The Shah and the Iranian Revolution — Part 2

The Shah will be a participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s. There will be no radical change in Iranian politics in the near future. Taken from a secret CIA document titled Iran in the 1980s, published in August 1977, just five months before the start of the Iranian revolution. In the mid 1970s, Iran and its reformist monarch Muhammad Reza Pahlavi was enjoying the height of its golden age. Iran had gone from strength to strength, a once backward, impoverished and in international diplomacy, insignificant nation whose claim to fame lay with it's ancient civilization.

Now a distant memory relevant only to history and archaeology enthusiasts, have been transformed into a major player on the global stage with the 5th largest army in the world, an Air Force that was the envy of even some Western nations. Iran was the single biggest customer of the United States arms industry, accounting for a full 50% of weapons sales. Iran had an alliance with the American colossus only comparable to that of Britain's. Truly, Iran and the US had a special relationship. The Shah had broken the British domination of the Iranian oil industry and Co opted international events to both drive up oil prices and present himself as a calming moderating force in a region famous for firebrand revolutionaries and blood soaked tyrants.

The boom in oil prices had set off a black gold rush that left the Shah with a problem few Iranian leaders had ever had. What to do with all this money? Gleaming new airports, towering skyscrapers, sparkling malls, pristine motorways that stretched as far as the eye could see, Schools and universities open their doors to men and women, presenting opportunities that Iranians only a generation before could not have imagined. The Shah state paid for Iranians to travel abroad to take up further educational opportunities. Fazi became common on campuses from Oxford and Cambridge to Harvard and the Sorbonne. 50,000 Iranian studied in the US alone. Hospitals and clinics were open to heal the sick and carefully injured, to set bones and bring comfort to the dying. Iranian art galleries purchased lost Persian artefacts looted by European colonial powers so that it would be ordinary Iranians, not privileged Westerners, who would stare in amazement at the treasures and bask in the greatness of Persian civilization.

All of this had been accompanied by sweeping social reforms. The White Revolution had sought to break the power of the clerics and land owners to give land to the peasants and rights to women. Women were given the right to vote in largely symbolic elections in 1963. In 1967 the Family Protection Act was passed that granted new rights to women. This would be further expanded in 1975 with the Family Protection Law. For the first time, women could divorce their husbands, be granted custody of their children, the age of marriage was raised to 18, and restrictions were placed on polygamy. Women made strides, with many taking advantage of university education and populating government at local and national level, rising to become judges and senior civil servants. But with all this success came unintended consequences. The land reforms have been poorly carried out and many peasants ended up swelling the slums of Tehran. These rural workers, now stripped to their land, were confronted with a glittering lifestyle of Iran's urban rich. Many men who had lost their status as providers resented the newly liberated women who challenged their roles as head of the family.

The Shah had faced crises. He had ridden on the coattails of a USUK coup in 1953 that had deposed Mohammed Muzaddek and allowed him to concentrate power in his own hands, transforming the throne from an ornament to the centre of political authority. The reforms of 1963 had sparked a wave of protests from religious conservatives, but swift action and a firm hand had put the social unrest down. The Shah had risen to the pinnacle of power, but maybe in doing so he had flown too close to the sun.

Welcome to ancient, to recent. My name is Joseph Parkinson and in today's episode we will continue the story of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the fall of the Shah. Episodes of Ancient Recent are out every Saturday and are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. If the Shah had felt a little smug by the mid 1970s, then you can hardly have blamed him. His achievements could be seen on every street corner and in every town and village of the land. But just in case anyone missed the signs of progress, or for that matter doubted who is responsible, the Shah took to reminding them.

New statues of himself went up. New parks, boulevards and highways were named after him. If one wanted to make their way to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Park, then you might take a turn left down Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Street. Then when you got to the statue of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, take a right up Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Rd. But beyond the pomp and ceremony, the system the Shah had created was starting to atrophy.

Authoritarian systems, however benign, reward loyalty, not dynamism, and value obedience not honesty. Corruption was rife, reforms poorly carried out. The system relied on one man, the Shah himself, to drive policy through. As soon as his attention shifted, policy would wither. Increasingly, with so much undeniable success, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi became convinced of his own abilities, maybe his own genius, believing the fawning praises heaped upon him by his sycophants and courtiers.

Increasingly, he lived in a bubble of highly selective reports, constantly telling him how well things were going, only to be shocked by sudden outbursts of disquiet, such as the Tehran bus riots of the early 1970s, which resulted in three days of running battles between protesters and police. Always a man who seemed to shirk responsibility and feared bad news, he became arrogant and increasingly dismissed the few advisers who would speak frankly to him.

This had a circular effect. A life of wealth and privilege awaited those that remained in the inner circle as long as they could bring the Shah the news he wanted or shield him from that he didn't. But banishment awaited those who were too frank or too honest. Thus it became easier to smile, nod and pile on the praise. After all, the system, whatever it's flaws, was solid. The economy boomed with average growth rates in excess of 11% in the mid 1960s and rising standard of living. There were teething problems, but that is to be expected. The Shah, ever reformer, pressed ahead with yet more changes. In 1975, he dissolved the two local political parties, the People's Party and New Iran Party, both really front organisations that merely gave the appearance of opposition, instead merging them together to create a single party, the Resurgence Party.

When some brave soul asked the Shah, won't this look a lot like a dictatorship? The Shah assured the doubters that the new party would provide opposition to itself. For opponents of the regime, the Shah took a carrot and stick approach. On the one hand, critics were to be Co opted. Clerics would be given subsidies, salaries, bonuses, funds for new ever expanded mosques and madrasses. For secular opponents. There would be opportunities to study abroad, scholarships, houses, guaranteed jobs, one off payments, cars, all sorts of goodies for those who would shut their mouths.

And for those that would not be bought off for them, there was the Savark. If a handful of cash and a flashing new motor would not change your mind, then maybe a prison cell would do the trick. The Shah became increasingly prickly, always somewhat of an awkward customer. He could obsess over the smallest details, how close chairs were to each other at formal royal functions. The finer details of royal protocol, how letters were signed, how he was addressed constantly drew his attention.

If an unflattering photo appeared in the tightly controlled state newspapers, then the editor could expect a royal tongue lashing. But despite the surface appearance of stability, 1970s Iran was a land in turmoil. You just needed to know where to look. The Shah had launched many as an ambitious infrastructure project, but each new burst of action piled additional pressure on the nation's power grid. The system began to buckle.

Blackouts became common, first occasional, then frequent, starting with mere minutes, soon stretching to long hours. Iran began to suffer from something economists called Dutch Disease, or the curse of plenty. Why invest in agriculture when cheap food could be imported from abroad? Why build a car industry when the latest Rolls Royce, BMW or Mercedes-Benz could roll up the dock fresh from Europe? Foreign food imports lead to a collapse in the Iranian agricultural sector, coupled with land reforms that ruined many peasant farmers and sent them into the slums of Tehran. So vast was the amount of food coming into the country that Iranian ports didn't have the facilities to unload it all or the trucks to carry it.

Food rotted on the docks. The rush of easy money caused inflation to climb and eat away into the savings of the poor. Suddenly Iran was a Society of the haves and have nots. The flood of agrarian workers into the cities caused a spike in housing prices. The economy was running white hot, but people's bills rose as quickly as their money lost value. Even members of the professional classes were spending between 50 and 60% just on housing.

As for the new arrivals, the slums awaited for government ministers who saw all this through charts and graphs, many of whom were chauffeured from grand palaces to Gordy residents only stopping at the latest cocktail party and never set foot in downtown Tehran. They were completely disconnected from the lives of ordinary people. As the economy overheated and the poor were ground down, discontent simmered underneath. Increasingly, the finger of blame was pointed not just at the Shah, but at his American backers. The huge foreign population living life both parallel to and completely disconnected from that of ordinary Iranians, caused great resentment for American residents. Learning fazi was almost unheard of, and all too many carried an air of arrogant superiority of their hosts. This was worsened by the 1964 decree from the Shah that made US servicemen exempt from Iranian law. Who was the Shah running Iran for? Many Iranians began to ask for the Iranians or for his American patrons.

This perception was added to by a rather insensitive choice of new ambassador. In April 1973, Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, was chosen to be the US man in Tehran. Once Upon a time, Tehran had been a backwater for US appointments, but it speaks to just how highly the White House now thought of Tehran to send such a respected figure to represent it. Though Helms may command respect in the Oval Office, memories of the CI as involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the populist nationalist and last democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, caused Iranian nationalists and sharp critics to have a sense of nausea.

By 1975, inflation had cracked up to a frightening 30%. But the Shah, in the rare event bad news did reach him, dismissed such reports as propaganda. After all, the economy was still booming. Rates of growth peaked at 30% GDP per year and such problems, power cuts, housing or inflation, well, it was just growing pains to be expected from a nation transitioning from feudalism to modernity. From the mid 1970s there was an uptick in left wing guerrilla activities with an occasional attack on a remote police station or killing of a soldier.

Pinpricks. But pinpricks hurt. The Shah granted SAVAK sweeping new powers to detain and interrogate suspects, accompanied by a juicy increase in budget. It's fair to say that some in Salvaq may have inflated the danger, exaggerated a report or two to just about putting another zero at the end of that check. As economic problems increased, so too did discontent, and the prisons soon began to fill up with those that could not keep their opinions to themselves.

The chill of repression filled the air. All of a sudden one had to be careful what one said over tea or ask oneself if a person you were about to confide in could really be trusted. But there was one person who was not biting his tongue, Ayatollah Ruhala Khomeini. Khomeini had been expelled from Iran after the White Revolution, where he raged at the social reforms, especially the new freedoms for women. He had started exile in Bursa in western Turkey, but having left Iran for fear of the bare legs of Iranian girls, he find no sanctuary in secular Turkey.

Beset by the horrors of the mini skirt and the push up bra, he decamped to Najaf in southern Iraq. Khomeini may have pined for the 7th century, but he was not against using the perks of the modern world to bring his revolution about. Day after day, night after night, he's spoken to the microphone, ranting, raving, railing against the sins of a sinful world, from alcohol to high heels, from pop music to hand holding. Nothing too trivial to escape his rage.

But Khomeini had one target, one enemy, one dragon. He hoped to slay the Shah himself. It was the Shah who drove modernization. It was the Shah who was trying to destroy Islam. It was the Shah who in turn would have to be removed. The Shah largely ignored Khomeini who cared about this irrelevant old fool ranting in Najaf. After all, the Shah had a country to run. The Shah's joint approach to dissent. Money for those who will be bought off, prison for those who wouldn't, silenced even moderate opponents, cutting off any channel for highlighting problems as he pressed ever forward. Without honest advisers and difficult conversations, without the ability to course correct, the Shah was running blind, unaware of the problems, ignorant of the lives of normal Iranians and their daily struggles. The open wound of discontent fested. And here's the problem.

The Shah presented himself as the father of the nation, the benevolent leader who wanted nothing but the best for his people. And from him all things flowed. Women can vote. That's because of the Shah. New hospitals, the Shah. Study abroad, the Shah. Power cuts, the Shah. Inflation, the Shah. If it is to the Shah that all credit for everything that is good must be given, then who gets the blame for everything that's bad? You guessed it, the Shah.

The Shah's most loyal minister, Asador Alam, tried to warn the Shah. He knew the Shah was being fed incorrect information and that trouble was being stored for tomorrow. But there was always just enough good news to stay ahead of events. The economy boomed. The money flowed in. The price of oil kept going up and up and up as the champagne flowed. Nobody wanted to listen to the party pooper. In 1974, Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon as the 38th President of the United States.

After the turmoil of the post 1973 period where oil producing nations had refused to sell to the West over support for Israel and then further banded together to hike prices, Ford was determined to prevent further price increases. Having emerged from World War 2 with a vision of itself as a shining knight bravely delivering democracy to the downtrodden peoples of the world, the US had blundered into Vietnam only to find itself mired in a horrific war that pitted American firepower against impoverished villages.

And yet, for all the artillery, B50 twos and napalm the US threw at the Viet Cong, it was the Americans who hobbled home in defeat. the US sought new ways to fight the Cold War. If M16 wielding GIS were not the answer, maybe the US could have someone else do it's dirty work for it. This was the Nixon Doctrine. Under Nixon and his foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger, the United States supported dubious regimes from Pinochet, Chile to Mobutu Zaire.

Safe in the knowledge that they would not take the blame as the car battery was being applied to the genitals of the student activist or the meddlesome priests. But defeat in Vietnam had been more than a military disaster for the USA. It was an existential crisis. Nightly images beamed into American homes of Vietnamese children screaming in terror as America's sons burned. Another village brought home hard questions.

Aren't we supposed to be the good guys? the United States wanted a change of direction, a cleaning of the slate, and simply outsourcing the brutality to Third World dictators wasn't going to cut it. In 1975, the Church Committee was set up to investigate an intelligence community that for too long had been allowed to police itself. The world was stunned. Assassinations, regime change, domestic espionage, The CIA and other intelligence bodies have been up to all sorts of dirty deeds. Among the revelations was the CIA its role in the removal of a democratically elected government in Iran under Mossadegh, to be replaced by the autocratic Shah. These revelations, and the Shah being seen as benefiting from rising oil prices as average Americans struggled, led to the Shah's reputation in the US taking a nosedive. If there was one man who seemed to embody the change the United States yearned for, it was James Earl Carter Junior, better known as Jimmy Carter, from the smallest of small town USA Plains, Georgia, population 573 in 2020. Carter had served in the US Navy during World War 2 and been active in the Civil Rights movement. A Southern Democrat who'd grown up on a peanut farm, he had come from nowhere to be elected governor of Georgia in 1970 and then even further beyond to defeat Herbert H Humphrey to snatch the Democratic nomination. And yet upset the odds once more by unseating a sitting president in 1976 and defeating Gerald Ford, Carter promised a new dawn.

The US would regain its innocence and human rights would be front and. Of his administration's approach to foreign policy, the Shah may have been isolated, but he could still read a newspaper. He knew that he had to get with the times. Savak was reigned in, political prisoners released, torture stopped, and the Shah even invited Amnesty International to discuss how he might further improve conditions in prison. The Shah had moved quickly to stay in step with the changing direction of US administrations and the trick seemed to work. It didn't hurt that though Carter was keen to talk the talk, when it came to a moral foreign policy, Jimmy Carter sang a different TuneIn private.

The Shah was too important an ally, ties with SAVAK too deep and exports of arms which ran at 10s of billions of dollars, too lucrative to earn anything other than a performative tongue lashing. The alliance with the US was safe. The Shah's position in power rested on 2 pillars, good relations with the US and high oil prices. If there was nothing to fear from the new Carter administration, then the story of the oil was very different. The Shah had played a key role in driving up oil prices, but the Saudis took a different approach. Whilst the Iranians had limited oil reserves, the Saudis had a vast ocean.

The Saudis wanted to play a longer game. High oil prices would encourage more drilling, which would therefore increase competition. But low oil prices made places where drilling was more expensive, Alaska or the North Sea, unprofitable. The Saudis thus sought to bring the price of oil down by flooding the market. Iranian state spending was out of control by the mid 1970s, but as long as the price of oil was high, the Iranians could always afford to pay the bill. But what goes up must come down, and after every party, there is the inevitable hangover.

With Saudi oil production surging, the price of oil on the international market collapsed. The Iranian economy shuddered to a halt. All of a sudden the Shah was broke. Oil production declined by 38%, construction ground to a halt, debts went unpaid, unemployment soared, capital flight began as many foreigners so keen to get their snouts into the through headed for the airports and they took every penny they had made with them.

This might have been a moment for the US to warn the Shah the good times were over. The grumbles of dissent could be ignored whilst the cash flowed. Now, maybe, is the time to start listening a bit more, be a bit more open. After all, if the Shah had taken all the credit for the good times, maybe it would be good to share the blame for the bad. But the CIA and U.S. intelligence services in Iran were just as blind as the Shah was.

U.S. intelligence gathered very little Intel on Iranian domestic politics and was only too happy to believe the rosiest reports handed to them by Savaq. U.S. intelligence officers who bothered to learn Farsi or travelled beyond the confines of their compound to speak with an actual Iranian were all too often viewed within the halls of US diplomatic missions as kooks, cranks or troublemakers. The shower was dealt a further blow. Just when he needed trusted advisors, Asador Alam, his long serving confidant, was diagnosed with cancer. Despite the best treatment, his cancer progressed. In a final act of faith as a loyal servant to the Peacock Throne, Alam penned a letter to the Shah begging for reform, but his warnings went unheeded.

On the 14th of April 1978, Asador Alam, the most capable, honest and loyal aide of the Shah, passed away. Now the Shah had no one by his side. The Shah and Carter met for the first time on 15th of November 1977. The Shah flew into the US and visited the White House. The Shah had met many US Presidents in his time and experienced treatment from patronising indifference by FDR to hectoring from JFK to bonhomie with Richard Nixon. He didn't know what to expect from the self appointed conscience of the nation, Jimmy Carter. The Shah's visit got off to a bad start. Crowds gathered outside the White House, displaying banners and chanting death to the Shah.

These protesters, mostly student, were the very people his government was paying to send abroad, and the most obvious beneficiary of his modernizing rule. If he didn't have them on board, one must wonder how bad it really could be. Anti Shah protesters were met by pro Shah demonstrators who at first exchanged insults but soon traded blows. Washington police tried to get between the two sides and soon the altering pro and anti Shah chants could be heard in the Oval Office, mixed with the sounds of battle and the smell of tear gas.

Neither Carter nor the Shah were known for their relaxed demeanour. The Shah could be awkward and prickly. Carter was notoriously cold, stubborn and standoffish, with a tendency to put his foot in his mouth. The Shah had sent Carter a message congratulating him on his electoral victory, only to wait for over 2 months for a reply. Carter had waited a further five months to select a new ambassador to Tehran and a further 2 to drive through the appointment. They sent a message that Tehran was no longer the favoured ally of the US.

To the Shah and Washington insiders, this may have seemed like a subtle message. In reality, it was something entirely more innocent. Jimmy Carter was just really crap at being president. He was a Washington outsider with no allies within the halls of power and neither the patience nor temperament to make any. Very soon, few people in Washington were willing to go out of their way to assist the new president. His administration ran into difficulties immediately.

Carter wanted to shift the focus of US foreign policy onto human rights, and that would require a change in relationship with Iran. From now on, the White House would call publicly at least for reforms, and arms sales would be subject to increased scrutiny. But from the start, Carter was sending mixed messages. In private, he assured the Shah that the two countries had a special bond and not to worry about public pronouncements. Seemingly against the odds, Carter and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi do seem to have grown fond of each other, even if Carter's famous lack of tact constantly got on the way. He made comments about the looks of Queen Farah, maybe going a little too over the line of politeness when complimenting her appearance at the state banquet, Carter gave a toast wise cracking that the Shah really knew how to draw a crowd. Referring to the earlier protesters that were calling for the Shah's death, everyone in the room erupted in laughter. Everyone, that is, apart from the Shah. Carter returned the visit by stopping in Tehran whilst on a trip from India to Poland in December 1977. Carter had wanted to enlist the Shah in the Middle East peace process.

Carter was gearing up for the Camp David summit, where Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begun would thrash out the Middle East Most Comprehensive peace Agreement. And this would be undeniably Carter's greatest success. In November 1977, protests erupted across campuses in Iran. 53 prominent liberals signed an open letter demanding reforms. Strikes increased as bank workers walked out. The heat was rising into this environment.

Carter touched down. In Tehran, Carter gave an infamous speech where he praised Iran as an island of stability in the Middle East. Was this tone deaf wishful thinking? Or considering the near non existence of U.S. intelligence gathering in Iran, was it actually what people in the US administration really thought? In 1978? Iran was one of the better dictatorships in the Middle East. Regime opponents were more often bought off than killed.

SAVAK were bullies rather than psychopaths. Corruption was bad, but again paled in comparison with the lives of pornographic excess that the Princess of Saudi Arabia enjoyed. And the Shah was taking steps to improve his regime's human rights record. Torture was ended. New cases filed with Amnesty International against Iran dropped to 0. The alliance with the US was as strong as ever. The economy was in a bad way, but the Shah had survived periods of turmoil before, such as 1953 and 1963.

There was no reason to believe that this wouldn't be another storm followed by yet again, more plain sailing. Anyway, the diehards, the rejectionists, the ones who would never accept the shark, they had no leader. The far left had been smashed and Islamists for the most part had been bought off and neither had a focal point. Who were they going to rally around Khomeini? He was busy playing karaoke in Najaf. Nobody cared about him anymore. Right?

On the 7th of January 1978, an article appeared in the Iranian newspaper Etilat called Iran and the Red and Black Colonization. The article was directed at Ayatollah Khomeini. The article accused Khomeini, a man now a decade and a half removed, from significance of everything from being a member of MI 5 to being a homosexual. The article asserted that there existed around Khomeini a secret alliance between red Communists and black Islamists, all committed to destroying the progress brought to Iran by the Shah.

This is one of history's great own goals, as Khomeini was by 1978, yesterday's man. But the state press attacking him in print suddenly elevated his profile, singled Khomeini out as a man. That the government feared for the Shah's press to directly insult a cleric caused outrage amongst the debate. Protests erupted in the city of Qom on January the 9th. Protesters attempted to storm a police station. Police officers fired into the crowd. Around a dozen people were killed and roughly 100 injured. Religious opinion was further inflamed. And now the opposition had a figure to rally around, a pattern set in that would confound outsiders, especially the US Sudden eruptions of violence that caused panic in foreign policy circles, quickly followed by periods of calm that convinced the US the storm had passed, only to be followed by yet more sudden outbursts of protests and demonstrations. Things seem to have settled down by the 25th of January. The CIA went back to telling Washington that all was well and dismissing its own members who tried to raise the alarm. To American eyes, the crisis seems to have passed. The Shah's regime was as strong as ever. On the 18th of February, the mourning period for those killed by police at Hom led to mass violent protests in Tabriz. Shops closed.

Crowds gathered to chant religious slogans. Buildings burned as protesters clashed with police, government buildings and anything carrying the symbol of the state or the name of the Shah was destroyed. Panic soldiers fired into the crowd. 100 people were killed. This set off a cycle, a period of calm followed by outbreaks of violent protests. These protests came at the worst time for the regime because not only was the economy shuddering, but it was also engaging in the process of liberalisation. Many of the restrictions on the press have been lifted. Images of the bloody St. battles in to breeze were now carried on the front pages of newspapers across Iran. The government tried to pin the blame on a conspiracy of communists and Islamists, but fewer buying it. On the 9th of April, the regime tried to reshape the narrative by organizing mass pro Shah demonstrations in Tabriz. Hundreds of thousands of loyal demonstrators were bust into the city.

Factories, offices, campuses were closed. Posters and placards handed out by Savaq. The government tried to make a token gesture removing a few local officials. Arrested protesters would be given civilian rather than military trials. Those found guilty handed fines as opposed to prison sentences. The Shah went further, announcing the release of political prisoners. At every turn. The Shah and his government tried the carrot and the stick, forcing the streets conciliation after again the moment seemed to pass. Calm descended to Salvaq, caught in Cold War thinking and fooled by its own self-serving inflation of the threat from the far left.

They focused their attention on communist groups, convinced that surely Islamists could only be a front for the Kremlin or puppets of the Reds. Yet again protests erupted. Yet again they died down. The Shah tried to mollify his opponents. More dismissals of minor officials. Subsidies were offered to clerics, public work projects announced for the unemployed. On May the 13th, the Shah invited a number of journalists to the royal palace for a 90 minute interview.

The Shah believed that he could talk directly to the people, cut out the middle men and the clerics, then he would be able to get his message across. The Shah gave a bizarre performance riddled with contradiction, 1 moment saying he understood the protesters concerns and would address them, the next blaming communists, Islamists, the Kremlin, the British, the CIA, anyone who he could think of. Instead of conveying to his people how much you understood them, he showed them how out of touch he was.

As things seem to be spiraling out of control, events suddenly took a turn for the better. The Shah made an annual trip to the city of Mashhad, A deeply conservative and religious stronghold in the North East of the country, to visit the shrine of Imam Reza, one of the most important figures in the sheer faith. He was warned by his advisers not to go, that it could cause ugly scenes. But on arrival, he was greeted by cheering crowds, the chants of Long live the Shah. See, all was well.

On the 5th of June, the 15th anniversary of the 1963 riots, Khomeini called for demonstrations to take to the streets to keep up the pressure. But as the Kingdom braced itself for yet more mass demonstrations, the day passed off with little problems. Maybe, just maybe, this time Khomeini had overplayed his hand. Maybe he wasn't the figure the opposition were looking for. The Iranian opposition was a mix of nationalists who pined for the days of Mosaddek, socialists many of whom turned to Moscow for inspiration, and Islamists who yearned for the glory days of Islam. Khomeini, an arch reactionary who wasn't in favour of sharing the family chores, never mind the means of production, was an odd figure to coalesce around.

Many Iranian opposition figures had fled the country in the wake of the 1953 coup, and in 1961 had set up the FMI Freedom Movement of Iran. The FMI sought to unite the left and the right, knowing that only a joint effort could ever hope to push the Shah out, and therefore those that want to change couldn't be picky about their allies. A communist Islamist alliance might seem strange to Westerners, but this is because we're looking at it from a 21st century perspective. To many, such an alliance was similar to liberation theology in Latin America, which blended the message of Christ with the vision of Marx to stand up to injustice. Some left wing opponents of the Shah were themselves deeply religious and knew the appeal that faith had with ordinary people because they themselves felt it. To the more secular minded left, they knew that they could protest all they wanted, but without a means to actually rally support within the country, they were howling at the moon.

The Islamists gave them a means of getting their message to the street. It gave them the ability to organise, to have an impact. What they needed was a cleric. But the Shah had gone to great effort to buy off most of the religious establishment. Anyone with reasonable moderate criticisms of the Shah was already in his pocket. If all the reasonable people have been bought off, then the only ones left are the unreasonable Khomeini.

It was the only show in town Khomeini saw in the socialists, communists and liberals who rallied to him. Useful tools, useful idiots. The Islamists themselves knew they were unlikely to drive the Shah from power alone. Khomeini needed the left as much as the left needed him. Khomeini, who had raged against mini skirts and lip gloss for over a decade, now try to pretend that he had mellowed with old age. He talked about human rights, democracy and freedom, about the injustice of the Shah's rule.

And the liberals, they bought it, they drank it in. But to his own people, Khomeini sang a very different tune. The Shah looked to capitalise on his window of opportunity. More announcements to win over the faithful. The Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, was to be subsidised by the state. New funds were to be made available to modernise and expand mosques. The clerics began urging their people off the streets. The Shah played for time. He began to negotiate with moderate clerics. As the Shah negotiated, he also dragged his feet. The crowds were off the streets, but the Shah believed that it was his cunning manoeuvres and open pocketbook that had brought calm rather than the call of the clerics. So confident did the Shah become that he decided to take his annual holiday to the Caspian Sea. After months of constant turmoil, he was exhausted. He put his feet up, swam, listened to music and read. If the Shah believed that time was on his hands, he was not alone.

When U.S. officials met to discuss the various hotspots in the world, Iran was way down the list. Returning from his holiday, the Shah kept up the reforming pressure. He announced national elections to be held in 1979 in a speech that was widely praised. The clerics had been bought off. The communists were isolated. Public works to soak up unemployment, dismissal of corrupt officials. And now meaningful reforms. The Shah seemed to be doing everything right.

But there was one thing the Shah could not control Luck. On the 21st of July, Sheikh Ahmed Kafir was involved in a fatal car crash in the city of Chenaran in the North East of Iran. Kafir had been a vocal opponent of the Shah and rumours soon spread that this had been no accident, this had been an assassination. Riots erupted in the city of Mashhad in Isfahan. Demonstrators burned cars and held stones under pressure from the general's martial law was declared for the first time since 1963. The Shah held another press conference on the 17th of August, blaming Islamic Marxists and delivering A contradictory performance, both promising reform and declaring that firm action will be taken against those who challenged the law. The 19th of August was the anniversary of the 1953 coup. For some a day of celebration, for others morning, but for many just a day off work and a chance for some fun. In the small city of Abaddon, people crowded into the cinema to watch an Iranian movie called The Deer. The audience was the usual crowd, families looking to distract young children, nervous teenagers on 1st dates. The same that would be in any cinema in the world. As the credits rolled, the smell of smoke filled the auditorium. People panicked, making their way to the exits. Firemen rushed to the scene only to find the hydrants were not working.

People became trapped in the doors. Hundreds pushed forward in desperate panic to escape the flames. Some were crushed, others trampled under foot. Some succumbed to the smoke and others consumed by the fire. Maybe as many as 470 people lost their lives in the Cinema Rex tragedy. The investigation immediately began and the conclusion was apparent arson. The doors have been doused in petrol. The newspapers howled with outrage. The Shah pointed the finger squarely at the Islamist Communist Alliance.

Cinema fires were not uncommon in Iran, often carried out by Islamist thugs who targeted racy Western titles. Clerics and public figures from across the political spectrum denounced the fire and expressed condolences to the family. This is all but one. Ayatollah Khomeini stayed conspicuously silent. In fact, Khomeini had been on record publicly praising the burning down of other cinemas. Islam requires the dead be buried within 24 hours and in individual graves. But government officials instead buried the victims in mass graves during howls of criticism. This first mistake set off a cascade. Straight away, questions started being asked. Wasn't this an Iranian film?

The Islamists didn't usually target Iranian films. Why had the fire hydrants not been working? How had the emergency services bungled the response so badly? Was it incompetence or was it SAVAK? The Shah made the situation worse by not visiting the city and paying his respects to the families. So recently he'd played his cards so well. Now he was foundering. To add insult to injury, the Queen through her annual lavish garden party.

As the bereaved mourned the Pahlavis sipped champagne. All of Iran saw a callous, out of touch elite indifferent to the plight of the downtrodden. As the rumours around Savak's involvement grew, the state media refused to issue a clear denial. In the silence, the echo grew louder. Mustafa Khomeini, son of Ayatollah Khomeini, was a man who enjoyed his food. In fact, he enjoyed his food so much that he was enormously obese whilst with his father in Najaf.

And during yet another mammoth eating session, he suddenly clutched his chest, keeled over and died. The atmosphere in Iran, already a bubbling quadrant of rumour, speculation and half truths, made ever worse by the Shah's unwillingness to distance himself from even the most outlandish of accusation, meant that yet again, the Shah was blamed. Khomeini himself said nothing. Those close to Khomeini in years to come were quite clear.

Mustafa was a very unhealthy man, and very unhealthy men have heart attacks. But at the moment Khomeini had been happy to use anything to blackened the name of the Shah. As for the fire, at the very event the Shah was being castigated for after the revolution, Khomeini's government sentenced a random soldier in the Shah's army, pinned the blame on him and had him executed. When the actual perpetrator, racked with guilt, came forward and announced that he and three allies, all of which had perished in the fire, had been responsible and done so in the name of the Islamic Revolution, Khomeini's government had first tried to silence him, and when he would not stop talking, they had him killed. But just to make sure nobody accused Khomeini's government of going soft, Ayatollah Khomeini selected a further four people almost at random, put them against the wall, accused them of the crime of the Cinema Rex fire, and had them shot. The new head of SAVAK was Nasser Moghadam, who was a liberal reformer.

He urged the Shah to seize the initiative back to make a grand gesture to show good faith to the people. The Shah decided to act. He would show a clean break with the past. He dismissed the Prime Minister Jamshid Ahmuzagar, but his appointment left Liberals in government stunned. The new Prime Minister was Jafar Sharif. Emami Sharif was a careerist whose name was synonymous with nepotism, favoritism and double dealing. Why on earth, when the Shah wanted to show a new face to his people, would he appoint someone so obviously associated with the old ways?

Sharif came from a deeply religious family with ties to the cleric, and he was the chosen candidate of Modra clerics within Iran. This was a move not to placate the people but to placate the religious establishment. Moqadam begged Queen Farah to speak to the Shah. This is a terrible mistake. It will backfire immediately. But the Shah would not listen. Sharif said about his task with energy, promising to root out corruption and open government to the people. Sharif closed casinos and cracked down on corrupt officials.

But he was notoriously corrupt himself and the casinos were run by the Pahlavi Foundation, which he had been chair of. Nobody was fooled. Sharif tried to play to conservative religious sentiment. The Ministry of Women's Affairs was dissolved and non-Muslims were purged from the government. The same old faces filled government positions. What was supposed to be a fresh start became another round of same old, same old.

Opposition figures announced that they would stand in the elections against the government rather than join its ranks. Clerics within Iran pressed for more reforms. Officials who adhere to the Baha'i Faith were to be dismissed from their government jobs. The Shah consented. All restrictions were to be lifted on marches to mark the holy day of Eid. But at this Sharif Bolt Sharif feared the soldiers may sympathize with the marchers. Martial law was declared yet again on the 8th of September 1978.

Protesters gathered in downtown Tehran to March to the city centre. They were met with a line of soldiers. An officer on a microphone called on them to disperse, but some sat down in the streets, defying the order. As the two sides faced off and tension rose, a sudden noise. Was it a crack of gunfire or just someone slamming a door too firmly? We will never know. What we do know is that in the confusion, the soldiers fired into the crowd.

When the smoke cleared, the streets were littered with the dead. As many as 70 had fallen. Rumours began to swirl immediately. They were government snipers. There were Israeli mercenaries who carried out the killing. Nothing was too outlandish to be believed. As the crisis grew, the Shah turned to the only people he felt he could rely on, his friend Jimmy Carter. But Carter was distracted. He was knee deep in the Camp David negotiations.

At the very moment the Shah needed support the most, his closest ally was absent. Carter managed to make a brief call with the Shah, but Carter was relying on the CIA for information on the situation, and the CIA took their intelligence directly from Samak, and Samak said that everything was under control. Carter went into the conversation blind and could only fumble through a few vague words of support. It became apparent that the Americans had absolutely no idea what was happening or the magnitude of the challenge the Shah's regime was facing.

September the 16th was just a normal day in the city of Tabas in central Iran. It was Saturday, a day of rest and relaxation. Families took their children to the park. People crowded into shopping centres and restaurants, went on dates, met in bars ahead of an exciting night out. But it's seven O 5:00 PM. The ground began to shake. Poorly constructed houses collapsed, trapping residents inside. Buildings fell on those in the streets as an earthquake that measured 7.4 in the Richter scale tore the city apart.

The destruction was biblical. The death toll ran as high as 25,000, with a further 4000 in the villages in the surrounding area. In a matter of moments, 80% of the population of Tabas were dead. Offers of international help from the UKUS, France and neighboring states flooded in, but the Shah turned them all down. The Iranian armed forces would instead take the lead. A massive relief effort was launched, but despite mobilizing the full resources of the state, years of corruption and the sheer scale of destruction overwhelmed the Iranian army. The Shah and Queen Farah decided to visit. With the Queen going first.

She received an angry reception. The Shah then made his way to Tapas, but instead of subjecting himself to the wrath of the crowd, which would have at least won him some credit for standing tall, he arrived at the airport, took the salute of a few hand picked loyalist, made sure the photographers got their pictures, turned around, boarded the royal plane and left. He never made it off the tarmac. Rumours continued to swirl, ever blacker, ever more outlandish. An earthquake, you say?

I heard there was no earthquake. There was instead a nuclear test performed on behalf of, or maybe even by the Americans. It had been on purpose. The Shah had ordered it. The Shah was responsible. Iran had always had a tense relationship with Iraq and natural rivalry, you could assume, between competing Arab and Persian civilizations. But things have been looking up. The Shah had supported Kurdish rebels fighting against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the 1970s. But in 1975, at the behest of the Nixon administration, the Shah suddenly cut all support to the Kurds and signed an agreement with Saddam that condemned 10s of thousands of Kurds to death as Saddam's hands. This is one of the most shameful and controversial events in the history, either of the Shah or of US foreign policy. Iraq is unique in that it is both overwhelmingly Shia and overwhelmingly Arab.

The small Sunni community has sought to avoid persecution by retaining political power. Saddam, A Sunni? We're starting to get worried about a charismatic Shia cleric on his own soil and the dangers Khomeini might pose if he decided to stir up Iraq's Shia community. Saddam had an idea. And like most of Saddam's ideas, it involved killing people. He contacted the Shah and offered to do his friend in Tehran a favour to solve his Khomeini problem permanently. But the Shah was not Saddam Hussein. Violence was a last option, not a preferred choice. The Shah thanked Saddam and politely turned down the offer. This, however, did not solve Saddam's Khomeini problem. Khomeini had outstayed his welcome. It was time to go.

Saddam ordered the arrest of Khomeini immediately. Protests erupted in Iran and ironically, it was the Shah who contacted Saddam and asked him to release Khomeini. Khomeini didn't have to go home, but he couldn't stay in Iraq. Time to find a new sanctuary. His first choice was another Muslim country not wanting to endure the indignities of the presence of the infidel. But none would have it. One of Khomeini's entourage recommended France.

Khomeini dismissed the suggestion. Full of Christians and atheists and they make their bread with LAR. Totally unacceptable. But eventually Khomeini came round to the idea. He was willing to put up with the infidel. After all, to Ayatollah Khomeini, everyone was in Infidel. France had a number of advantages. It was a major communication center and a hub of the global media. Plus, France had allowed, due to the Shah's efforts, visa free travel for Iranians. On the 6th of October 1978, Ayatollah Ruhala Khomeini touched down in Paris.

His arrival was the first the French government knew he was coming and caused considerable anxiety in government circles. Hermenei stayed in the flat of one of his supporters before a bungalow was made available for him in a small village. French officials were quite clear with Khomeini, he could not engage in any political activity while he was on French soil. Khomeini agreed. For now Iranians from around Europe began making their way to see Khomeini. Soon the small French village echoed to the sound of the call of prayer, and French police had to erect barricades to keep people out.

Khomeini ignored the deal with the French government. As soon as he made it, he answered to a higher power, and he was not going to lack respect for the laws of some infidels get in the way of his divine mission. When French officials objected, Khomeini threatened to denounce France and call for action against French people from the Islamic world. Faced with such a threat, the French government backed off. Iranians began travelling from Iran itself to visit Khomeini, including clerics who would bring back the Ayatollah's orders directly to Islamist agents in Iran. Canadian journalist Carol Jerome visited the village and saw the scenes of ecstasy that Khomeini supporters greeted his every word.

His supporters may have loved him, but what Jerome saw was something completely different. A man of granite almost from a different world. Every social change, every advance, every inch of progress of the past 1200 years had passed him by. He was a man of a different Millennium who spat pure venom at every freedom and possessed an almost Leninist determination to destroy everything he considered impure. As Jerome and other Western reporters spoke to Khomeini, his words were translated by three interpreters. They not only translated his words, they modified his message to make it more acceptable, more palatable to a liberal Western audience.

But Khomeini was a fire breathing profit. He had no intention of compromising. A tense calm that had descended on Iran was soon punctured with the news of Khomeini's arrest in Iraq. Oil workers went on strike. Further strike spread to other parts of the economy. At first the demands were for higher pay, though soon morphed into calls for political change. The economy ground to a complete standstill as oil production collapsed. The Iranian Prime Minister tried to buy time by offering workers 100% pay increase, but this only encouraged more workers to join the strikes in hope of getting a better deal and further added to runaway inflation.

The government became like a swimmer battling against the tide, flailing ever harder just to catch a breath. Law and order began to collapse. Each protest confronted by soldiers led to more casualties, which in turn led to more protests. Soldiers were told to stand down, let protesters, even rioters, continue without intervention. The government tried to talk to the opposition, but each round of talk lead to more compromises, which was soon in turn surpassed by the next round of demands. The government was in a state of total paralysis. The state was a one man band and that band was the Shah. Autocracies reward loyalty, not initiative. As such, state officials were not empowered to make decisions for themselves.

They relied on the Shah for direction, and when he was paralysed, so were they. So hollowed out had the Iranian state become that governors were not allowed to leave their regions nor generals their own bases without expressed permission from the Shah. The government seemed to catch your breath with its immense giveaways. Workers started going back to their jobs and the 40 day mourning periods for the anniversary of the Tehran massacre passed without major incident.

The government's desperate efforts at dialogue lead to a 12 point program being hammered out with the Freedom movement of Iran. But before order could return, the program would need approval of Ayatollah Khomeini. The representatives of the FMI travelled to meet Khomeini. They believed they had struck a deal. The 19 O 6 Iranian constitution was to be restored, major reforms of government. The Shah was to be stripped of his power and return to be a constitutional monarch.

The FMI put the deal to Khomeini. His reply was simple. No, there was to be no compromise, no halfway, no give and take. The monarchy was to be abolished and Islamic Republic formed, and those that opposed were to be swept away. It would be a fight to the death. In Iran, the Shah waited for the final outcome of the negotiations. Ideas were being frantically discussed. Coalition government, military rule, anything to save the system.

But the Shah, as he so often did, vacillated at the moment of crisis. He wanted the approval of others. Maybe it's the way of assuaging his guilt. He called in both the UK and US ambassadors and asked them for their opinions. They both pushed for compromise and reform. Anything to avoid the spilling of blood. On November the 2nd, the Carter administration finally realised something was seriously wrong in Iran. A crisis meeting was called. How could it be that the US is most important ally in the region was all of a sudden at the point of collapse? A frantic discussion took place.

What should the Shah do? What should the US do? Should the Shah continue to reform or send in the troops? The Shah was desperate for an answer. He turned to the US, begging them to give him direction. As so often happens with committees torn between reform and repression, they decided on both. Carter told the Shah he needs to take command and listen, to be open to reform but not let things get out of hand, and to be a compassionate leader but a firm ruler.

The mixed messages of the Carter administration, incapable of understanding the situation and totally devoid of any intelligence, simply further paralysed the Shah. More massive protests continued. The UK embassy was rampaged. Word came back from Khomeini. The Ayatollah had rejected the deal. The Shah had one last card to play. The Shah had decided on military rule. On the 6th of November 1978, the Shah took to the airwaves once more.

He issued A bizarre statement where he seemed to take the side of the protesters. The Shah both announced military rule and that he was siding with it's. Opponents. This was a total disaster, paralysing the armed forces who now had no idea if they were to put the protest down or join them. How could they act to protect the Shah and the state against the protesters? If the Shah and the state was with the protesters with no clear direction, they did nothing. The system had reached the point of total collapse. Thank you for listening to Ancient to Recent. Next week, we shall continue the story of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini. Episodes of Ancient to Recent are out every Saturday and are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcast.